Hexahedron Henry

Hexahedron Henry

This round one world is a game developed for the Oculus Rift, using a Leap Motion device for hand tracking.

The game is about an astronaut who crashes on a cube-shaped planet, that can be manipulated like a rubix cube. The goal of the guest (player) is to help the astronaut collect all the parts of his spaceship and leave the planet.

Before I go on, I would like to acknowledge the members of my team who I worked with:Producer/Sound Designer: Audrey HigginsGame programmers: Michael Luan, Jenny Liu3D modelling and 2D art: Timothy Ahene, Guangya NiuAnimation: Jenny Liu

Our goal was to make a game with two characters, where one character was afraid of the other, and the guest had to help that character achieve their goal while protecting them from/helping them avoid the other character.

During brainstorming for an idea for our game, I found it to be very helpful to visualize our best concepts, in order to see if they were feasible. I made a number of quick sketches on my phone to help move the design process along.

However, after drawing out a sketch of what the Rubik's Cube world would look like, my team and I were completely sold on the idea.

Since the Oculus is not ideal for a game that require the player to move around a lot, we decided to have a game with minimal movement. The first idea we considered doing was one where the guest was a security guard, helping the protagonist escape from somewhere, using your multi-screen view from the security room.

Since the world was set on a Rubix cube, we decided to go with squarish characters and environment objects with flat colors for textures. After we had made this decision, I went to work on developing a simple design for the enemies in the game.

Concept Sketch

Render

I also made sketches of some the models I made for the world, in order to know how I would represent them in the cube style we were using, before modelling them in Maya. Most designs changed a little when I modeled them.

When everything had come together, we realized that our game was difficult to play without instruction on what gestures did what in the game. So I suggested we make a tutorial using animated 2D images to demonstrate the gestures. I proceeded to draw the hands poses necessary, as specified by Jenny. The drawings were inked by Guangya.

Our game was finally finished and all we had left to do was make a credits reel. Not having enough time to make animations for our characters, we settled on having static images, which I designed. Of the images that made it into the credits, I inked two, colored one and Guangya inked the other two. Below are the sketched and inked versions of the images.